Sunday, November 30, 2014

Back when the Trayvon Martin
case was the outrage du jour, the media, most notably CNN
and the New
York Times, saw fit to identify his shooter, George Zimmerman, as a “white
Hispanic”. Was this to brand Zimmerman as some sort second
rate, inferior type of Latino? Was it to
lump him in with what Dr.
Leonard Jeffries would call the “ice people” who are "pathological,"
"dirty," "dastardly, devilish folks"?

"I have to tell you that there has
been systematic racism, institutionally in state government for decades,
including my own state party. So what we are looking at right now is a symptom
of racism that has been swept under the rug for decades. And I am so glad now
that the truth is out, and I'm very grateful to your network for telling the
truth in reporting the truth of what's going to go down in the coming
days."

"As it was said earlier today, and
because of the systematic racism that we have in our state government, and our
state party, and we do not bring the truth to bear, then we will not recover
from what we are going on.

In order to demonstrate that
to white middle class voters that he was not beholden to Black interests, White
Democrat Presidential candidate, Bill
Clinton, deliberately picked a fight with rap artist Sistah Souljah. In doing so, Clinton embarrassed Jesse
Jackson at his own Rainbow Coalition convention in 1992. Clinton calculated, cynically and correctly
that Black voters, including Jackson himself, would get over it and fall in
line with whomever the Democrats nominated.

To enhance her street cred
among minorities and garner special consideration from schools and employers, White
Democrat, Senator Elizabeth Warren falsely asserted that she was of Native
American ancestry for years.

VP & WD Joe Biden:
Explaining why schools in Iowa are performing better than those in
Washington, D.C., Biden told the Washington Post, “There’s less than one percent of the population of Iowa that is
African American. There is probably less than four of five percent that are
minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off
with, what you’re dealing with.”
What’s up with that? What’s that
supposed to mean?

Modern WDs, Chris Matthews gushed over then candidate Barack
Obama as he came off as damn near White in his speech and mannerisms.

Matthews: “You know I was trying to think about who he
was tonight and it's interesting... he is post-racial by all appearances. You know I
forgot he was black tonight for an hour.”

Frederick Douglass was
asked what America should do for its former slaves. He answer was to do nothing but set them free. Any additional meddling would only
cause them more misery.

What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are
emancipated? ... What shall be done with them? Our answer is, do nothing with
them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. You’re doing with them is
their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they
now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They
suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone.

White Democrats ignored
Douglass’ advice. In doing so they have
created a patronage class that is beholden to them and dependent upon the state
“benevolence” for food, shelter, healthcare, protection, education, etc., etc.,
etc.

One White Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan broke ranks with his
clan, pointing out how state
paternalism was destroying Black families, thereby condemning generations to
come to lives of fatherlessness, poverty, criminality and despair. He prophesied that it was a cancer that
would only grow worse and more debilitating over time. He was correct, and for speaking the truth he was pilloried
by his peers.

Earlier this year, Wall
Street Journal reporter and African American, Jason Riley, called upon America
to heed Douglass’ wisdom and to correct that errors that Moynihan saw. In his new book, Please
Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It
Harder For Blacks To Succeed, Riley
methodically dissects the welfare, exposing how it destroys Black
self-determination and poisons the culture.

Be it well-meaning but
misguided help or a cruel plot to breed dependency, African Americans need to
free themselves from the economic and political patrimony of White
Democrats. This is not a call to vote
Republican, not at all. It is a call to
opt for the freedom, liberty and independence that Frederick Douglass demanded
over a century and a half ago.

Liberty and reason know no race. They are the essential condition for lasting
peace and prosperity.

Saturday, November 29, 2014

The president likes to position himself as a model of racial
enlightenment. In fact, he's a hypocrite who played the race card to win
election -- and has done nothing to help struggling Americans, black or
white.BY SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

whatever else Bill Clinton has lacked as
president, he has never wanted for calumnies: he's been branded a sex addict, a
liar, a creeping socialist on health care, a closet reactionary on welfare.
Through the entire barrage, however, one facet of Clinton's character has
enjoyed nearly uniform admiration. As a child of the Jim Crow South who
transcended its dogma of segregation, he is perceived as the ideal healer of
America's continuing racial rift. The ease and camaraderie he displays in the
pulpits of black churches is genuine.

Just days ago in Salon, Clinton's fellow Southerner and former handler James
Carville hailed him as "without doubt the wisest and bravest white man I've ever
known" on matters of race.

Now, more than halfway through a presidency undefined by any single
achievement, Clinton seeks to seal his place in history by reconciling the races
through honest, engaged dialogue. This campaign for posterity's favor --
orchestrated out of the White House -- began with Clinton's speech at the Shea
Stadium ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first game in
the major leagues. Noting in his address that "we've been trying to catch up
ever since," the president served notice he would be returning to the topic of
race frequently.

Sadly, Clinton has shown himself to be just as hypocritical on this issue as
on, say, middle-class tax cuts. And the inconsistency owes to the same root
cause: the obsession with winning election. That was nowhere more clear than
during the 1992 campaign, when Clinton showed he could play the race card with
expertise.

It started in the weeks leading up to the New Hampshire primary. Clinton's
campaign was reeling from disclosure of his alleged affair with Gennifer
Flowers. Paul Tsongas was providing unexpected competition. Yet in the midst of
such pressures, Clinton flew back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a
convicted murderer named Ricky Lee Rector.

True, Clinton had always favored capital punishment. And true, Rector had
slain two men 11 years earlier. But after shooting them, he had turned the
weapon on himself. As political reporter John Wordock of Bloomberg Business News
recounted in his masterful study of race, poverty, and the 1992 campaign, "Where
The Trail Didn't Go," the bungled suicide had doctors scraping bullet fragments
from Rector's brain, leaving him essentially "lobotomized." One of Rector's
lawyers, Wordock noted, personally informed Clinton of the convict's condition
to try to stave off execution.
Too late. Rector, dispatched by lethal injection, could not be exploited
against Clinton's campaign as the black felon Willie Horton had been against
Michael Dukakis by George Bush in 1988. Clinton, the New Democrat, would not let
himself look similarly soft on crime.

Clinton's 1992 campaign was largely guided by Stanley Greenberg's polls and
focus groups of working-class white ethnics in Macomb County, Mich. Those
studies revealed that such swing voters saw the Democratic Party as beholden to
blacks, and saw blacks, in turn, as the embodiment of social chaos. And Willie
Horton had first been turned into a political symbol not by Bush but by the 1988
Democratic presidential contender who became Clinton's running mate in 1992 --
Al Gore.
A few months after Rector's execution, and only six weeks after the
devastating Los Angeles riot, Clinton again performed a brilliant bit of
political theater to demonstrate his independence from black interests. During
an appearance before the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, Clinton made a
startling rebuke of Jackson for having included the controversial rapper Sistah
Souljah in a coalition panel.

"Her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with a kind of hatred
that you do not honor today and tonight," Clinton said. "Just listen to this,
what she said. She told the Washington Post about a month ago, and I quote, 'If
black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white
people? ... So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing
somebody, why not kill a white person.'"

But Clinton took the quote totally -- and one must assume deliberately -- out
of context. In the offending interview, Sistah Souljah had been asked to
speculate as to why feuding black gangs in South Central had struck a truce
during and after the riot. Her answer reflected her surmise as to what the
Bloods and the Crips were thinking. Such a nicety was lost on the president and
all those who applauded his apparently spontaneous outburst.

In fact, there was nothing spontaneous about it. The Clinton campaign had
planned the confrontation to show Clinton's independence -- not from an obscure
rap singer but from Jesse Jackson, the latter-day incarnation of what in the
1960s was routinely referred to as a "black militant."

The strategy worked. Jackson's profile in the 1992 convention and the fall
campaign was the lowest in a decade. Clinton captured enough votes from places
like Macomb County to triumph in a three-way race. And once in office, with
Ricky Lee Rector and Sistah Souljah consigned to the footnotes of history,
Clinton flourished his bona fides as a racial mediator. Few commentators doubted
them, even as he was signing the punitive welfare bill during the 1996 campaign.

But it was Jackson, released from political quarantine one night during the
1996 Democratic convention in Chicago, who offered a real vision of transracial
politics. He spoke of the class-based economic issues he had propounded in his
own bids for the presidency. He reminded the self-satisfied audience that it was
dancing the Macarena on the edge of the vast, largely black West Side slums,
which not so long ago had throbbed with tens of thousands of jobs at Sears,
Western Electric and other businesses -- all of them by now relocated or closed.

These people, too, along with the white "Reagan Democrats" of Macomb County,
were supposed to have benefited from Bill Clinton's pledge in 1992 to restore
"good jobs at good wages" for the American working and lower classes. But as any
informed American knows -- and the recent books by Dick Morris and Robert Reich
confirm in grim detail -- Clinton has turned his back on the poor and
blue-collar families who have been suffering from America's hidden Depression
for the past quarter-century.

It is dispiriting enough to recognize the chasm between the soothing rhetoric
on race Clinton now offers and the cunning use of polarization he practiced to
first gain the presidency. Worse still is the realization that the issues he
should tackle in order to heal Americans of all races have by all available
evidence been abandoned.

April 25, 1997Samuel G. Freedman is the author of "The Inheritance: How Three
Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond" (Simon &
Schuster), a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of
"Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church" (HarperCollins, 1994). He is a
frequent contributor to Salon.

"The
poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It
may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may
enter; the rain may enter; but the
King of England cannot enter - all his force dares not cross the threshold of
the ruined tenement!"

William
Pitt 1st Earl of Chatham

Speech
in Parliament against an excise tax on perry and cider – 1763

Our Constitution and the
ancient legal traditions that precede it acknowledged the sanctity of the home
so much so that the world’s most powerful man cannot enter uninvited. If that be so, then it should also stand the
householder should be able to invite whomever he so chooses into his home and
to determine the conditions of entry.

He may throw a pot-luck party
and require all who enter to bring a dish.
He may throw a masquerade ball and insist that all guests come in
costume. He may permit his adult
children to live in his home but demand that they pay rent or contribute to the
payment of bills. He may allow his kids’
boy/girl-friends to sleep over but not in the same room. He may forbid alcohol consumption or indoor
smoking. He may respectfully ask those
with whom he disagrees to leave. He may
in engage in any sort of erotic escapades that float his boat with one or more
consenting adults.

To a limited extent, the
protections that an American enjoys in his home are also extended to his motor
vehicle. He is protected from
unreasonable search and seizures. He may
allow any consenting adult whom he so chooses to ride as a passenger in his conveyance.

It would seems as plain as day
that an owner may invite whomever he pleases to stay in his home or to ride in
his car. One would think. However, songstress Cyndi Lauper, was dead
on in singing that money changes everything.

In city after city, cabbies,
limo drivers and hoteliers
are turning their friends in government to squelch the average guy and gal
in the street from competing with them.
The main claim of established licensed operators is that they are
subject to regulations and taxes that ride and room sharers bypass.

On the surface this seems like
an unfair advantage that the sharing economy players have over their
traditional rivals. However, it is
essential to understand that regulation, licenses and fees are only barriers to
keep small, underfunded and under-lawyered startups on the sidelines. They only masquerade as “consumer
protection”.

America’s Founding Fathers
were students of John Locke who taught that sole purpose of government was to
uphold individual liberty by protecting private property. He wrote:

“The supreme power cannot take from any man
any part of his property without his own consent: for the preservation of
property being the end of government, and that for which men enter into society.”

By barring average citizens
from disposing of the spare rooms in their homes and empty seats in their cars
as they see fit, the government nullifies its raison d’etre of defending property rights in order squelch
competition for its A-List clientele.

Uber and its drivers, Airbnb
and its innkeepers are doing more than making money on underemployed
assets. They are fighting for the
essential liberty that America was founded to preserve. They are defending our little castles from
being overrun by crony kings and two-bit tyrants.

"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction." -Paul Simon

Monday, November 17, 2014

Following
the Republican route in the recent election, a liberal friend in New Mexico
posted on Facebook that voters have short memories.

Indeed
he is correct. Every six to ten years
Americans throw Democrat bums out for Republican bums only to sweep the joint
clean of Republicans to replace them with Democrats.

This
brings me to the November-December issue of The
American Conservative which features a cover story by Bruce Bartlett
entitled “Obama is a Republican”.
Bartlett makes the compelling case that our President is the
intellectual and policy heir of Richard Nixon and details how chillingly
similar mainstream Republican and Democratic policies really are.

For
starters, the individual mandate, which is the lynchpin of The Affordable
Healthcare Act was a conservative and Republican endorsed invention until the
Democrats got ahold of it. Bruce traces
the mandate’s lineage from its inception at the supposedly free market Heritage
Foundation. Washington, DC’s premier conservative think tank recommended a coercive,
top down, centrally imposed remedy to America’s healthcare ills. In 1989 they wrote:

“Under this arrangement, all
households would be required to protect themselves from major medical costs by
purchasing health insurance or enrolling in a prepaid health plan. The degree
of financial protection can be debated, but the principle of mandatory family
protection is central to a universal health care system in America.”

Over the following two decades the
mandate was embraced by numerous prominent Republicans and was the cornerstone
Governor Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan in Massachusetts.

Republicans and Democrats alike
backed bailouts for reckless and irresponsible Wall Street cronies. Both Bush and Obama put forward their own
brand of Keynesian stimulus plans.

Two consecutive Republican
appointed Fed Chairman (Greenspan and Bernanke) inflated currency and economic
bubbles at unprecedented rates. And prior
to Obama, the Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush 2 ran up record
deficits. Of course this was shrugged
off by Dick Cheney when he remarked in 2004 that “Reagan proved that deficits
don’t matter”.

And before we leave the topics of
war and finance, let’s not forget that when the Cold War ended, President Bush
1 did use the opportunity to scale back federal spending. Instead, he mused about “reinvesting the peace
dividend”. He did so by going to war in
Iraq and raising taxes despite his pledge not to do so.

The truth is that over the years,
the Republican Party has done little to live up to its marketing position as
the party of small, unobtrusive and limited government.

Beginning with their first term in
power under President Lincoln, Republicans destroyed the concept of federalism
and states’ rights by waging war on Southern secessionists.

The next great Republican icon,
Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive activist who had little regard for
constitutional restraints. Republican Herbert
Hoover introduced an array of economic interventions that his successor,
Franklin Roosevelt simply continued and rebranded as the New Deal Like the individual mandate, many New Deal
ideas were Republican inventions.

For sure there have been some
outstanding individual small government Republicans over the years including
Presidents Harding and Coolidge, Senator Robert Taft and Congressman Ron Paul
to name a few. Sadly, that wing of the
party was overcome in the Sixties by the progressive Rockefeller wing which has
been supplanted by a cadre of Trotskyite former Democrats deceptively called
Neoconservatives

"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction." -Paul Simon

Monday, November 10, 2014

I don’t know about where you live, but here in
the Garden State, I see this misleading bumper sticker everywhere: No Farms, No
Food.

For the purpose of this discussion let’s define
a farm an enterprise in which one or more human beings plants, cultivates and harvests
food crops primarily for consumption by others beyond his household, friends
and family.

On the face of it, the bumper sticker is true
enough. If no one grew food for others,
most people in post-industrial America would starve. The question is are these human beings who
produce food crops for others going to vanish from American society? They won’t.
However, their numbers have diminished and may continue to do so. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

The flaw in the bumper sticker’s logic is that
it treats farmers, that is, human beings, as a fixed single purpose
resource. I would accept the logic of
saying “no apple trees, no apples” or “no pigs, no bacon”. If blight were to wipe out all apple trees,
there would be no apples as nothing but an apple tree can produce apples. Likewise a world without pigs must by
definition be a world without bacon. And
not a world worth living in, by the way.

Human beings, on the other hand, are most
flexible of economic resources. Chances
are that the guy playing guitar at your Friday watering hole night is a CPA or
computer programmer during the workday.
He may get up the next morning and coach his kids’ ball teams, then go
home to refinish his basement. Being a
modern guy, he might also help cook dinner and clean up afterwards.

The point is that humans can do a lot of
things. They can repurpose themselves to
different occupations if the spirit so moves them. The spirit will so move them if food is
scarce, other people are willing pay to have something to eat and a reasonable living
can be made by farming, which it can.

Agricultural science and technology have
progressed exponentially since this nation was founded. As of 1790 the U.S. population was only 5%
Urban with all others classified as Rural.
This aligned with the Jeffersonian vision of an agrarian nation comprised
of largely self-sufficient and self-governing freeholders. Improvements in agricultural technology and
distribution have made it unnecessary for the preponderance of people to
produce their own food.

As you can see from the chart below, a single
acre of ground could produce nearly 8X more corn by the year 2000 than when our
constitution was ratified.

Globally crop yields throughout the world,
measured in kilograms per hectare*, continue to improve at a steady rate.

Improved efficiency in food production fires up
the division of labor and exchange.
This frees up the majority of workers to produce the cornucopia of
consumer goods that modern civilization takes for granted. Although few if any middle class Americans
self-produce enough to food to live on, the wealth of devices and conveniences
in their homes and on their persons was unimaginable in Jefferson’s agrarian
utopia.

A good number of existing farmers are also
catching onto this trend. They are
turning away from “commodity farming”, that is corn, wheat, soybeans, etc. for
industry. They are turning to boutique
crops – fresh vegetables and fruits – for local table tops.

Responding to this sea change, cities such as
Seattle are beginning to set aside urban agricultural zones. Forward thinkers are designing urban farm towers and other structures
that will redefine “farming”.

The reality is that food is always priority #1
for human beings. No matter what
technical gizmos, luxury items or fashions we may crave, we will need to feed
ourselves before we can enjoy any of the other frills of 21st
Century living. Consciously or
unconsciously, rational people will make food procurement the top item on their
value list. In turn, market forces will
profitably satisfy this need.

“No Farms, No Food” is propaganda on behalf of
sustained and increased government intervention on behalf of agriculture. Intervention distorts markets and leads to
malinvestment. It stifles innovation
and is a slush bucket for political cronyism. Agricultural
price supports helped to accelerate, aggravate
and prolong America’s Great Depression. Federal agricultural spending is an annual $156 billion income transfer from taxpayers to agribusiness,
farmers and welfare recipients. This
includes Food Stamps which are an indirect subsidy to farmers by helping lower
income people meet artificially inflated food prices. This must stop now!